Jillian Hirsch is an artist and educator based in New York’s Capital Region. She received her BFA from the New Hampshire Institute of Art and her MFA from the University of Tennessee. She is currently an Assistant Lecturer at Skidmore College, where she teaches Drawing, and previously served as Director of Arts Education at the Arts Center of the Capital Region. Jillian also teaches in the Fine Arts Department at SUNY Adirondack and at Russell Sage College, and has taught high school art at the L&N STEM Academy in Knoxville, Tennessee.
Her work responds to human-caused environmental change, exploring the shifting boundaries between culture and ecology. Through ceramics, drawing, public art, and community collaboration, Hirsch celebrates the resilience of weeds, the kinship of pests, and the layered beauty of damaged or novel ecosystems. Her practice invites audiences to cultivate ecological literacy and reconsider their place within the natural world, finding joy and hope in a shared, multi-species future on a finite planet.
When she is not in the studio or classroom, Jillian enjoys gardening, beekeeping, and reading science fiction.
ARTIST STATEMENT
The Anthropocene is a proposed name for our current geological epoch; a time on Earth characterized by human-caused planetary change. Without much regard for the many other forms of life that inhabit this planet, our species has been shaping landscapes, extracting resources, and generating waste at an exponential rate. Although the magnitude of this collective impact can be measured and mapped on a geological scale, it is much harder to perceive (or even care about) these changes through the tiny lens of our day-to-day life. Too often the environmental baseline shifts to a future that is more depleted than before.
As an artist and educator in the 21st Century, I feel an overwhelming responsibility to make work in response to human-caused environmental changes while critiquing the problematic cultural idea of “the natural world.” As we continue to extensively shape the planet, I believe we can no longer afford to think of nature as something unadulterated and separate from humans. My research rejects the all-but-mythical romantic view of nature as a human-less wilderness brimming with native flora and fauna in favor of a more empathetic and inclusive view that recognizes the complex and layered beauty of novel, untraditional, and damaged ecosystems. My artwork embarrasses the vitality of weeds, the kinship of pests, and the ingenuity of invasive species. Both my studio and social practice aims to cultivate a greater sense of ecological literacy and environmental imagination while asking the viewer to reconsider their place in the "natural" world. Through multimedia artwork, community engagement, and cross-disciplinary collaboration, my practice is a sincere attempt to cultivate joy and find hope for a multi-species future on a finite planet.